Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the Royal Court, who initiated No Grey Area in response to the Weinstein scandal.
Photograph: Johan Persson/PA

The sexual harassment allegations concerning the director Max Stafford-Clark are just one of many “skeletons in the cupboard” in the theatre industry, according to the artistic director of one of Britain’s most famous theatres, who will be drawing up behaviour guidelines she hopes all theatres – and other industries – will adopt.

Vicky Featherstone, who has been in her post at the Royal Court theatre in London since 2013, was speaking after No Grey Area, a day of action at the theatre, which aimed to shine a light on the systemic nature of sexual harassment in the industry.

Over the course of more than five hours on Saturday, 150 stories of sexual harassment were read out on stage at the Royal Court, ranging from tales of subtle belittling behaviour to serious sexual assault, which left attendees “ashen-faced” and “quite shaken”, said Featherstone.

Since her tweet, it has emerged that Stafford-Clark – a former artistic director of the Royal Court – had been forced out of the Out of Joint theatre company he founded due to a formal complaint about lewd comments he is alleged to have made, which were first revealed to the Guardian.

Speaking on Sunday, Featherstone said knew stories from her own theatre’s past would come out. She said: “The Royal Court has always been a place where brave and courageous stories have been told, but it has also had a real history of complex abuses of power. There are a lot of skeletons in the cupboard at the Royal Court. Max is just one to come out, but there are others. But there are in other places as well, it is no worse at the court.”

She was quick to stress that she had also been contacted by people in journalism, the music industry and people who work in parliament. She said: “Yes, it’s hugely problematic [in theatre] but it’s just hugely problematic in society, and that’s really important to say.”

However, Featherstone said she was optimistic that theatre and society as a whole was reaching a point of no return where sexual harassment would no longer be acceptable. She said: “It felt like ... we have got to the top of a mountain, and a rip has been torn in the patriarchy. I’m not saying it will all be solved, but things will never be the same again.”

“Theatre reflects the world as it is but it also reflects the world as we want it to be, and therefore if we imagine the world that we want and put that on our stage, then things can change,” she said, adding that she had “no doubt” that playwrights would be working on pieces based on the topic of sexual harassment.

Featherstone admitted to being “more scared than ever before” when sending the first tweet. “I knew if I started the conversation, it was about to unleash so much and that you can never go back from it.”

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“There have been stories for years but there hasn’t been a Harvey Weinstein moment to kick things off before,” she said. “Actually, we’re fortunate that that Hollywood outpouring has galvanised us to stop us being hypocritical and knowing these things without doing anything about it any more.”

Last year, the Royal Court held a company-wide meeting on sexual harassment following five complaints of incidents, which resulted in a mutually agreed verbal code of conduct. Featherstone said the aim was to “eliminate the so-called grey areas that so often allow people to get away with abuses of power”. On Saturday, four similar industry-wide meetings were held in a separate space to the sharing event.

Featherstone will be using the ideas gathered in the meetings to draw up a code of behaviour she hopes will be adopted by theatres, casting directors, agents, drama schools, and by other industries. The code may include advice such as not meeting junior members of staff outside of working hours.

Downstairs, members of the theatre and the public read the 150 accounts submitted anonymously through an open call on the Royal Court website. No perpetrators were named to enable stories to be shared free from legal consequence. They were curated by Lucy Morrison, the associate director of the theatre, who said it was important to hear stories so patterns of behaviour could be recognised.

She said: “I have felt both sad and heartbroken by [the stories] but also excited for change. You can’t sit through those stories and not feel really moved by the bravery of writing them and the bravery of surviving them.”

She added: “I feel really strongly that the way we have put this event together is about giving space for that and moving forward with action.”

At the end of the sharing event Featherstone thanked the audience for listening and said the stories told could now “never go unheard”.